Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

He was remarkably facetious on these occasions, sometimes ferociously so. For instance, Barante records of him, that at one of his pleasant soirées he sent away the husbands into a room apart, and kept the wives together in his grand saloon. These, he and his myrmidons despoiled entirely of their dresses; after which, having flung a covering over the head of each lady, who dared not, for her life, resist, the amiable host called in the husbands one by one, and bade each select his own wife. If the husband made a mistake, he was immediately seized and flung headlong down the staircase. The Landvogt made no more scruple about it than Lord Ernest Vane when he served the Windsor manager after something of the same fashion. The husbands who guessed rightly were conducted to the sideboard to receive congratulations, and drink various flasks of wine thereupon. But the amount of wine forced upon each unhappy wretch was so immense, that in a short time he was as near death as the mangled husbands, who were lying in a senseless heap at the foot of the staircase.

They who would like to learn further of this respectable individual, are referred to the pages of Barante. They will find there that this knight and servant of the Duke of Burgundy was more like an incarnation of the devil than aught besides. His career was frightful for its stupendous cruelty and crime; but it ended on the scaffold, nevertheless. His behavior there was like that of a saint who felt a little of the human infirmity of irritability at being treated as a very wicked personage by the extremely blind justice of men. So edifying was this chivalrous scoundrel, that the populace fairly took him for the saint he figured to be; and long after his death, crowds flocked to his tomb to pray for his mediation between them and God.

The rough jokes of the Landvogt remind me of a much greater man than he—Gaston de Foix, in whose earlier times there was no lack of rough jokes, too. The portrait of Gaston, with his page helping to buckle on his armor, by Giorgione da Castel Franco, is doubtless known to most of my readers—through the engraving, if not the original. It was formerly the property of the Duke of Orleans; but came, many years ago, into the possession, by purchase, of Lord Carlisle. The expression of the page or young squire who is helping to adjust Gaston’s armor is admirably rendered. That of the hero gives, perhaps, too old a look to a knight who is known to have died young.

This Gaston was a nephew of Louis XII. His titles were Duke of Nemours and Count d’Etampes. He was educated by his mother, the sister of King Louis. She exulted in Gaston as one who was peculiarly her own work. “Considering,” she says, “how honor became her son, she was pleased to let him seek danger where he was likely to find fame.” His career was splendid, but proportionally brief. He purchased imperishable renown, and a glorious death, in Italy. He gained the victory of Ravenna, at the cost of his life; after which event, fortune abandoned the standard of Louis; and Maximilian Sforza recovered the Milanese territories of his father, Ludovic. This was early in the sixteenth century.

But it is of another Gaston de Foix that I have to speak. I have given precedence to one bearer of the name, because he was the worthier man; but the earlier hero will afford us better illustrations of the home-life of the noble knights who were sovereigns within their own districts. Froissart makes honorable mention of him in his “Chronicle.” He was Count de Foix, and kept court at Ortez, in the south of France. There assembled belted knights and aspiring ’squires, majestic matrons and dainty damsels. When the Count was not on a war-path, his house was a scene of great gayety. The jingle of spurs, clash of swords, tramp of iron heels, virelays sung by men-at-arms, love-songs hummed by audacious pages, and romances entoned to the lyre by minstrels who were masters in the art—these, with courtly feasts and stately dances, made of the castle at Ortez anything but a dull residence. Hawking and hunting seem to have been “my very good Erle’s” favorite diversion. He was not so much master of his passions as he was of his retainers; and few people thought the worse of him simply because he murdered his cousin for refusing to betray his trust, and cut the throat of the only legitimate son of the Earl.

We may form some idea of the practical jests of those days, from an anecdote told by Froissart. Gaston de Foix had complained, one cold day, of the scanty fire which his retainers kept up in the great gallery. Whereupon one of the knights descended to the court-yard, where stood several asses laden with wood. One of them he seized, wood and ass together, and staggering up-stairs into the gallery, flung the whole, the ass heels uppermost, on to the fire. “Whereof,” says Froissart, “the Earl of Foix had great joy, and so had all they that were there, and had marvel of his strength, how he alone came up all the stairs with the ass and the wood on his neck.”

Gaston was but a lazy knight. It was high noon, Froissart tells us, before he rose from his bed. He supped at midnight; and when he issued from his chamber to proceed to the hall where supper was laid, twelve torches were carried before him, and these were held at his table “by twelve varlets” during the time that supper lasted. The Earl sat alone, and none of the knights or squires who crowded round the other tables dared to speak a word to him unless the great man previously addressed him. The supper then must have been a dull affair.

The treasurer of the Collegiate Church of Chimay relates in a very delicate manner how Gaston came to murder his little son. Gaston’s wife was living apart from her husband, at the court of her brother, the King of Navarre, and the “little son” in question was residing there on a visit to his mother. As he was on the point of returning, the king of Navarre gave him a powder, which he directed the boy to administer to his father, telling him that it was a love-powder, and would bring back his father’s affection for the mother. The innocent boy took the powder, which was in fact poison; and a night or two after his return to Ortez, an illegitimate son of Gaston found it in the boy’s clothes. The base-born lad informed against his brother, and when Gaston had given the powder to a dog, which immediately died, he could scarcely be kept from poniarding his son upon the spot. The poor child was flung into a dungeon, where, between terror and despair, he refused to take any food. Upon being told of this, the earl entered the chamber in which the boy was confined, “he had at the same time a little knife in his hand, to pare withal his nails.... In great displeasure he thrust his hand at his son’s throat, and the point of his knife a little entered into his throat into a certain vein; and the earl said, ‘Ah, traitor, why dost thou not eat thy meat?’ and therewith the earl departed without any more doing or saying.” Never was brutal murder more daintily glozed over, but Froissart is so afraid that he may not have sufficiently impressed you with a conviction of its being a little accident, that he goes on to say “The child was abashed, and afraid of the coming of his father, and was also feeble of fasting, and the point of the knife a little entered into his throat, into a certain vein of his throat; and so [he] fell down suddenly and died!”

The rascally sire was as jolly after the deed as before it; but he too one day “fell down suddenly and died.” He had overheated himself with hunting, and in that condition bathed in cold water as soon as he reached home. The description of the whole of this domestic scene is one of the most graphic in Froissart, but it is too long for quotation. It must suffice that the vast possessions of the count fell into the hands of that villanous illegitimate son, Sir Jenbayne de Foix. The latter was one of the six knights who, with Charles VI., entered a ball-room disguised as satyrs, and fast chained together. Some one, who is supposed to have owed no good-will to the king, flung a torch into the group. Their inflammable dresses immediately caught fire, and Sir Jenbayne de Foix was one of those who was burned to death. The king himself, as is well known, had a very narrow escape.

Perhaps one of the chief home pleasures enjoyed by knights when not engaged in war, was the pleasure of the chase. Idle country gentlemen now resemble their chivalrous ancestors in this respect, and for want of or distaste for other vocations, spend three fourths of their rural time in the fields. In the old days too, as ever, there were clerical gentlemen very much addicted to hunting and moreover not less so to trespassing. These were not reverend rectors on their own thorough-breds, or curates on borrowed ponies, but dignified prelates—even archbishops. One of the latter, Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, presumed to hunt without permission, on the grounds of a young knight, the Earl of Arundel, a minor. On the day the Earl came of age, he issued a prohibition against the archiepiscopal trespasser, and the latter in return snapped his fingers at the earl, and declared that his way was as legally open to any chase as it was free into any church. Accordingly, the right reverend gentleman issued forth as usual, with hounds and horses, and a “numerous meet” of clerical friends and other followers, glad to hunt in such company. Their sport, however, was spoiled by the retainers of the young earl. These, in obedience to their master’s orders, called off the dogs, unstopped the earths, warned off the riders, and laughed at the ecclesiastical thunder of the prelate, flung at them in open field. Edmund, finding it impossible to overcome the opposition of the men, addressed himself to the master, summarily devoting him ad inferos for daring to interfere with the prelatic pastimes. Nothing daunted, the young earl, who would gladly have permitted the archbishop to hunt in his company, whenever so disposed, but who would not allow the head of the church in England to act in the woods of Arundel as if he were also lord of the land, made appeal to the only competent court—that of the Pope. The contending parties went over and pleaded their most respective causes personally; the earl with calmness, as feeling that he had right on his side; Edmund with easy arrogance, springing from a conviction that the Pontiff would not give a layman a triumph over a priest. The archbishop, however, was mistaken. He not only lost his cause, but he was condemned in the expenses; and if any one thinks that this decree checked him in trespassing, such an idea would show that the holder of it knew little of the spirit which moved prelates fond of hunting. The archbishop became the most confirmed poacher in the country; and if he did not spoil the knight’s sport by riding in advance of the hounds with a red herring, he had resort to means as efficacious for marring the pleasures of others in the chase. He affected, too, to look down upon the earl as one inferior to him in degree, and when they encountered at court, the prelate exhibited no more courtesy toward the gallant knight than was manifested by Lord Cowley in Paris toward the English Exhibition Commissioners, when the mere men of intellect were kept at what the peer thought a proper distance by the mere men of rank.